Upon approval of the Scope, the RPA will be authorized to commit the balance of the designated planning services (up to $30,000, less those funds spent on the preliminary planning process) on behalf of the community. Interlocal Plans

While each community is unique, many communities face common issues with regard to planning their futures. Communities will be pooling their resources to address the transportation element of the CD Plan on a multicommunity basis. For other elements, communities are encouraged to examine interlocal efforts as appropriate.

Some key areas where cooperative planning can be especially important are:

• Water supply and protection concerns.
• Decisions regarding location of public facilities, infrastructure expansion, and transportation.
• Address all four core elements of the CD Plan.

A community may pursue an interlocal plan for one or more of the core elements (e.g., interlocal economic development strategy) provided that:

1) The remainder of the four core elements are sufficiently addressed in a recent prior plan(s) that will be converted to GIS maps or addressed in a separate part of the Scope of Services.

2) Each community seeking to participate in an interlocal plan element has been presented with a completed buildout map and analysis by EOEA.

Communities need to ensure that they are meeting all the elements of the Community Development Plan, either as a community or in an interlocal planning process. It is possible for a community to work on some elements of the plan individually and to work with other communities on others; it is not an "either/or" choice. For example, a community may choose to consider its open space and resource protection and housing plans individually but work with neighboring towns on transportation and economic development. Even if the community decides to develop an individual CD Plan, local leaders may want to share updates on progress with neighboring communities, meet with adjacent communities to identify shared concerns around particular issues and/or use regional venues such as regional planning agency (RPA) meetings for periodic reports on the plans. The RPA may have additional suggestions on how to best share both your community's progress in plan preparation and the plan's results.